Why I Hate Asparagus
The flinging and shaking of the snake went on and on, dust flying, the reek of mashed asparagus mixing with the hot smells of snake blood and dust.
Welcome back to That Mystic Road—I’m so glad we’re time traveling together.
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Today, our Time Machine is my kitchen: one smell of roasting asparagus, and I am instantly back in the hot orchards of my childhood harvesting feral asparagus and dodging feral snakes. In our family storytelling tradition, one story reminds us of another, and they all get chained together, as I do here. I start with an asparagus hunt, but then I’m reminded of a story Mickey/Mom told me about Warren wanting to make love outdoors in snake country. Caesar the brave cocker spaniel finds his way back through time to relive the epic fight he had with a rattlesnake; well, you see how it goes!
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Snake Stories—you’ve been warned!
Why I Hate Asparagus
If I blast asparagus at 500 degrees Fahrenheit for eight minutes, the fan in my oven is so good that I don’t get whiff of the stench. I set the hot pan under the stove hood, so I can’t smell the steam as I dress the roasted spears in olive oil and a chopped melange of garlic and chives, tarragon, oregano, and rosemary my husband Peter has just rushed in from the garden. The herbs were limp from the first frost but still redolent when my chef’s knife hit them. The roasted hothouse asparagus will make a nice addition to my antipasto plate that evening, but mine won’t be among the competing fingers for the delicacy: I hate asparagus.
My dislike of asparagus officinalis isn’t based on the instinctual rages of childhood. I won’t eat soft egg yolks, and Mom says I spit out the first spoonful she ever stuck in my mouth. However, I’ve heard that asparagus is like avocado, a generally acquired adult taste. No matter that Mom boiled it until the house stunk of oxalic acid, the odds were that as the 1950s conviction that all vegetables were to be reduced to hot baby food mush gave way to the enlightened steaming methods of the 1970s, I would grow to like it. A truly sublime hollandaise or gentle Japanese pickle has broken harder cases than mine.
The thing is though, thanks to emigrant farmers, asparagus essentially grows wild in my home country of eastern Washington even though it is a perennial plant native to central and southern Europe, northern Africa and western and central Asia. I understand the ancient Greeks loved it, and we have the Romans to thank for cultivating it. Specifically, I blame Diederik Leertouwer, who came to this country in 1784 and has the dubious distinction of being the first to introduce asparagus to the New World. In Chelan County it came up among the rows between the apple trees, along with the poison oak and wild onion, to which it is related along with all the other lilies like garlic, leeks, turnips and gladioli.
In our valley, asparagus could be found in the hot spots along the riparian zone of Horse Lake Creek, or down among the cottonwood trees lining the Wenatchee River on our side. Green spear tips could be hunted in the rustle of last year’s cheat grass under unburned heaps of apple prunings called brush piles. When I think about how much I hate asparagus, it’s hard to believe that one gardener won land and a title when he figured out a way to provide hothouse asparagus to Louis XIV of France in the 1670s. About the same time, Germans began producing white asparagus. By the Wenatchee River, you could kick away half-rotted drifts of cottonwood leaves to find new white asparagus shoots.
Asparagus season comes during May in Wenatchee, when the days warm quickly to 70 degrees, then chill off like butter in a draft when the sun disappears behind a cloud or Dormaier’s Hill. We were four kids: Cheryl, the oldest, then down four years to me, then another three to our brother Lisle, and eighteen months to sister Toren, set forth into this innocent Eden to share the hunt with rattlesnakes. Daddy always said, “Just remember, rattlesnakes are wherever you want to be, to cool off or warm up; semper vigilent; never stop looking or listening.”
On any particular May morning in the 1960s, our mission was to fill a fifty-pound box with asparagus, which Mom would blanch and freeze, and Daddy would drive over the hump—across the Cascades—to relatives on the western slope, who had foraged blueberries for this annual exchange. We would stand at the edge of the orchard while Cheryl divvied up the territories. She was the oldest, so she would go the farthest afield, up to the plowed field that edged between Dormaier’s Hill and their orchard, following the fence line. I got the orchard that ran from the culvert under our yard up both sides of the creek to our rural bus stop. Lisle and Toren got the frontage road alongside the railroad tracks.
Picking asparagus made me sleepy. I hated the sticky stems, that distinctive pungent odor mixing on the air with the scent of spring sage. We kids called it “asper-grass,” unconsciously riding an old linguistic highway, which began with the word “asparagus” in the mouths of classical Greeks and Romans, then rode off to England in the 16th and 17th centuries as “sperage.” It made a hard left turn into “sparrow grass” in the 18th century, and another left in the 19th to come full circle back to “asparagus.”
To rouse myself on this one particular “asper-grass” hunt, I climbed down into the creek cut by the culvert, counting on the cooler air by the water to clear my head. From where I squatted rinsing asparagus slime off my hands like a fastidious raccoon, I spotted a good stand of twenty or more spears on the warm south slope by the culvert mouth. Using a series of large, mid-stream rocks, I crossed over and bent down to snap the stems off below soil level. I spotted the rattlesnake coming out of the culvert about the same time it saw me. It put its blunt, heavy head to the ground, slipped into the water and slipslid fast upstream. The thick, heavily patterned skin almost disappeared against the dappled light on the running water. At the curve it hauled its four-foot length out into a sunny patch of dust surrounded by prime asparagus, curled lazily as a cat around itself and gave itself over to the dubious pleasure of watching me.
Sex in the Coulee
When I see snakes, I either run or freeze, often both. I have my mother’s fear and my father’s fascination with them. My mother tells a story that demonstrates this dichotomy. She and Daddy took a childfree field trip one Sunday afternoon up to Moses Coulee in North Central Washington: about twenty-one miles east of Waterville. Moses Coulee is a narrow, spring-fed valley created between 12,000 and 20,000 years ago during the last Ice Age. The huge channels and coulees of Eastern Washington were dug out by floods that ran all the way from Montana to the Pacific Ocean. The area Mom and Daddy visited is now owned by the Nature Conservancy and described as having “500-foot basalt cliffs, talus slopes, side canyons, rolling hills, fresh and alkali springs and flood deposits on the coulee floor,” all prime rattlesnake habitats. At one end of the coulee is Jameson Lake, excellent rainbow fishing in the spring, and on this particular spring day, two men were hauling out their boat having caught their morning limit.
“Nice day, cool and warm,” went the initial exchanges, then Mom, just as a precaution, asked, “Seen any snakes?”
One fisherman propped a knee-high booted leg up on the trailer hitch and considered. “Well, now that you mention it, we did see one itty-bitty momma snake up the hill behind the outhouse,” he shook his head, “but that’s about it.”
“Yep,” confirmed his partner,” that’s about it for snakes.”
Reassured, the parents continued their hike around the lake, following the trail that led between the twin black crystal bulks of the basalt cliffs. In the picnic area, Daddy was excited to spot a sleeping rattlesnake under a table, but the shade was too deep to get a good photograph. Daddy pointed out wild flowers as they went, stopping to photograph a sego lily, a yellow sulphur lupine, a shooting star or sagebrush buttercup. Mom had the binoculars up spotting the bright flash of a lazuli bunting, observing a loggerhead shrike impaling insects on a mock orange thorn, or drawing Daddy’s attention to a marmot or least chipmunk.
Then, “Hold it,” Daddy said, but Mom, guided by a preternatural sixth snake sense instinct, had already more than held it. She gave out a muffled shriek, leapt straight up into the air and landed ten feet back on the trail. The beautiful snake stretched languorously across the trail looked startled at the sound, then wrapped itself in loose, alert coils, head up, rattle buzzing quietly, a gentle preliminary warning.
“Crotalis viridis,” Daddy breathed in appreciation, then his camera was out; he was switching lenses, getting out the polarizer, looking for that unusual angle, the ultimate close-up. I inherited his slides and can tell you he all but climbed down that poor snake’s throat. He was certainly well within striking distance. That mouth is open, listening with the glistening, black, forked tongue the way snakes do, and the camera is right in there. You can see the complicated cotton batting of the red mouth, the place where the jaw unhinges to encase its prey, the side bulges where all the extra sets of fangs reside in their various stages of development, the listening black tongue, forked and flickering. You can bet Mom was in the background, holding the camera bag or a reflector umbrella and her breath.
Eventually, the bored snake slid off the path, and they continued their hike, Daddy eager for another Kodak moment, which wasn’t long in coming. A slender young rattler challenged the camera from the top of a rock pile. “That’s a young one. Stay back, Mildred, they’re the most dangerous when they’re young or when they’re shedding,” he said, climbing up on a boulder to shoot down at the furiously buzzing youngster.
Mom never needed to be told to stay back. At this point she was torn between the romance of a rare hike alone with Daddy and the desire to run screaming from the coulee.
I’m looking at slides Daddy took that day of a hunting snake. It is weaving down the path, head held high, almost cobra-like above the ground. The head turns left and right, aiming the heat seeking pits on either side of its head into the brush. The body moves along in a mesmerizing interaction of muscle, vertebrae and interlocked scales.
This turned out to be a seven-rattlesnake walk, which made my Dad very cheerful and horny over lunch by the spring. Pointing out a shady patch of grass under a serviceberry bush, he suggested a spot of outdoor lovemaking. Mom said she turned icy cold at the very thought and perhaps for the only time in their married life, refused to even consider the idea. “Warren Brown, this place is infested with rattlesnakes!”
I guess he gave her the puzzled, oblivious, 1960s equivalent of, “Yeah? And your point is?”
She says on the way out they saw the two fishermen again and pointed out that they were both wearing knee-high snake boots.
In Which Caesar Kills a Snake
So I ended up with my mother’s primordial snake fear right along with Daddy’s scientific curiosity. Although there I was down in the culvert, frozen with asparagus in one hand and a bucket in the other, a detached part of my mind admired the remarkable length of the snake in the asparagus patch, the hand-painted beauty of it, its anguine curving as it had pushed against the current, head held high, rattles up out of the water. As it curled, I could clearly see those heat-sensing facial pits. Daddy had shown us cross-section illustrations of the head and pointed out the reserve fangs that replace any that might break off in a victim. A new set developed and replaced the old every sixty days. We also knew from first-hand experience with horse and dog that the venom caused extensive tissue damage, bleeding and swelling. So when I released from my spell of admiration, I shot up the creek bank and came out on the long drive that connected our house and the lower orchards to Horse Lake Road.
I stood in the road sweating, freezing, panting. To this day I cannot endure even a photograph of a rattlesnake staring directly at me from an Internet web site. Screaming and running both course through my body like the remembered venom of fear as I fumble for my mouse and scroll for a photo in which the snake’s head is turned away from me. Even snakeskin boots give me the creeps.
Slowly, my heartbeat returned to normal. Perhaps not on this day, but on a day very like this one, I became aware of sustained barking down across the railroad tracks. I followed the drive past our house with the riverrock chimney, by the pasture with its whitewashed rails, then crossed the tracks to the frontage road. I could see Lisle with his hair so short that our uncles called him Burrhead poised in a skinny kid silhouette with a long stick. The neighbor’s black spaniel Caesar was barking at something cornered against the creosote crossties.
As I broke into a run, the little dog charged again and again, insane with excitement. Closer now, I could see the dark shape of a raised rattlesnake head, swaying high above its pile of coils. There really are not many things more terrifyingly ugly than a Western Diamondback Rattlesnake head with its alien triangularity. This one was distinguished by two dark stripes, one on each side of its face, which ran diagonally, like a thief’s mask, from its eyes back to its jaws. Its back was lined with dark diamond-shaped blotches outlined by lighter-colored scales, the tail circled by several alternating black and white bands, like a ring-tailed cat. For the first time I noticed the elliptical shape of the eyes, preternaturally intelligent as it faced off against the little cocker spaniel.
This snake was backed into a corner, so it had turned on Caesar. Caesar would dart forward to nip at the reptile, which would strike at him, lunging a quarter, a third, or more of its length. Caesar danced away, black paws kicking up dust and asparagus stems where Lisle’s bucket had fallen in the fracas. Toren had climbed up on an apple bin; Lisle had a big stick and stood over the action, ready to charge if he had an opening, but more respectful of the lethal fang and venom system of the snake than the excited dog.
As I reached the action, Caesar made one heroic dash in to grab the snake behind the head. The tail flung into the air and came down across the spaniel’s body, attempting to get a grip. But rattlers aren’t pythons; their deepest instinct is not to coil and squeeze but to strike and poison. Fearless Caesar began shaking the rattler violently back and forth.
“Get back!” Lisle shouted, and both of us moved back out of range of the flying snakehead to join Toren up on the apple bins. Two or three times Caesar let go long enough to get a better grip and the rattlesnake would coil furiously or strike from where it had been forcibly thrown, but the spaniel was not only fast but beside himself with hysteria, barking. The flinging and shaking of the snake went on and on, dust flying, the reek of mashed asparagus mixing with the hot smells of snake blood and dust.
After a while it became obvious Caesar had subdued the snake and would be here dealing with it for another hour, so maybe not on this exact day, but on one very like it, Lisle, Toren and I turned back to the problem of picking our share of fifty pounds of asparagus.
“Let’s go along the orchard road. I’ll rustle the grass with my stick for snakes and you guys pick,” Lisle suggested.
This worked as we made our way along the orchard road toward the river. I was jumpy and spooked at the least rustle Lisle made in the grass. By the time we reached the river, my hands and forearms itched with asparagus juice. I wanted to rinse them in the river, but I was afraid of the huge piles of unburned orchard brush we had to pass to get down to the water.
“Look,” Toren pointed out, always on task, “Have you ever seen so much asparagus?” We spent the late afternoon beating the brush pile for snakes, then clearing it away to get at the crop of slender, pale green spears. The smell of asparagus slime rising from our buckets mingled with the smell of snake fear rising from my own body.
About the time the sun slipped behind the hills, we might hear, let us say that this time we heard Ralph Dormaier riding toward us on his small orchard tractor with the short flatbed home-welded to the back for hauling apple bins. “You kids look like you could use a lift,” he said, and helped us load our buckets and apple boxes of asparagus on to the flatbed. Toren and I wedged ourselves in, feet pulled up, but Lisle left his legs dangling, his stick still on the alert. Out by the railroad tracks, Caesar lay crouched down guarding his very dead and mauled snake. He growled when Ralph poked at it with Lisle’s stick and whistled admiringly. “I knew eagles and coyotes tackle them, but I didn’t know a cocker spaniel could take down a five-foot rattler. Good dog,” he told Caesar, “Good dog. You go home now.”
Caesar grabbed the carcass in the middle and headed for home, head held high, practically on his tiptoes, but the snake still dragged along on either side of him, leaving a rail of blood on the shiny silver rails.
Mickey Gets a Surprise
Ralph turned the tractor down the frontage road back toward his place. “Your Mom said Cheryl was picking up on the hill. Let’s go find her.” The little John Deere passed by the road cut where we knew there was a vein of shiny black coal crystals, passed through the cluster of outbuildings and pickers’ cabins, then turned into the upper orchard that lined the edge of the sagebrush and juniper wilderness.
Perhaps not exactly on this day, but on a day very like it, under a large Golden Delicious, Cheryl’s blonde head bent in a close conversational angle to Daddy’s. They were clearly discussing something of interest, so we four sprang down to join them. They were regarding an unusually thick, heavy, five-foot long snake coiled in a sunny patch, tongue-flicking in their direction, tail up. This was easily the largest snake I had ever seen, and I felt that cold sweat collecting behind my ears again, the smell of asparagus coming from Cheryl’s full apple box heightened as I went on full alert. But Daddy was pointing calmly for all of us to look at the upraised tail. Ralph squatted down on his heels and regarded the snake thoughtfully. “No rattles,” he said.
“That’s right. No rattles.”
“But,” I objected,” it looks like a diamondback.”
“But,” Daddy explained, “only other rattlesnakes have rattles. The rattles grow segment by segment, each rattle the keratin remnant of a shed skin. Rattlesnakes can add two or three rattles each year, with each molt, although it may also break off some of its rattles in the course of a year.”
“So this is a bullsnake, too,” Lisle said.
“Like the one Mom and I saw in the cellar,” Toren added, hanging far back, and Daddy nodded. We all remembered the late autumn afternoon when the lights went out. Mom had grabbed a flashlight, and she and Toren had gone down the cold cement stairs to the fuse box in the cellar. The box was on the open-stud wall between a couple of two by fours. Mom concentrated the beam of light on the box, looking intently for the correct fuse switch to flip. It was Toren who said in a shaky voice, “Mmmom. Sn-nake.”
Mom really doesn’t like to be teased about snakes. She doesn’t like fluffy blue and pink toy snakes or pictures of snakes or stuffed snakes of interest in natural history museums. She particularly would not like to be teased about a snake in a dark basement, so reasonably she scolded Toren: “Don’t try to scare me like that. I don’t appreciate it.”
Little tow-headed Toren just pointed and stuttered, “Ssn-nake.”
Then Mom saw the snake coiled around the fuse box, hanging over it, looking her right in the eye just inside the circle of light thrown by the torch. I wasn’t there, but I don’t have to be told the decibel of the scream that ensued or the mad scramble up the cellar door out into the light of day. I’d have been cold and shaking, my heart racing, my mind a primordial churning chamber of inchoate fear, and I imagine Mom and Toren experienced it just that way.
Of course, they assumed it was a rattlesnake with that ugly head and the strong diamond markings. Mom rounded up the nearest male, who happened to be our neighbor John Jorgensen, to deal with the snake in the basement. I don’t imagine Johnny was too thrilled about the need for heroics, either, but in those days a man had to do what a man had to do. He went in after the snake, realized it wasn’t a rattler, and came out with it wrapped around a rake handle. He dispatched it with a shovel. After it was dead, Toren showed she had the same dual nature as the rest of us toward snakes, because she came close as he dissected it to reveal an undigested mouse in its belly.
“Bullsnake,” Daddy said when he got home. “It was down in the cellar doing its job.”
“I hired Sojah the cat to keep the mice down, thank you very much,” said Mom, still over-excited from the encounter, “no snakes bull or otherwise need apply. But,” she added as an after thought, “that reminds me of a snake I heard buzzing in the orchard by the bus stop when you kids were little. I walked over where two or three young crows were mobbing what looked like a rattlesnake. It had its tail up waving, and it was making that rattle sound. The neck was bulging where it was holding air in and forcing it out of its mouth in an imitation rattle.”
So we knew the bullsnake in the orchard was a rattlesnake imitator after we’d looked it over.
“Non-venomous,” Ralph said, moving away as the bullsnake moved its head in our direction, listening with its tongue. “Orchard-friendly? Eats rats and gophers, right?”
“Right. In fact, it’s probably out looking for a mate. It has live young. I wonder where the nest is,” Daddy said, looking around speculatively.
“The snake lives,” Ralph announced, “All aboard!”
Try It With Ketchup
For two days and nights following the asper-grass hunt, the smell of blanching asparagus stank up the house with oxalic acid. Mom tried serving some for dinner, but not one of us would eat the stinking green mass. She had a charming, Depression-era custom I’m glad to say she’s since left behind, of making sure we tried a little of everything served, and that we ate everything on our plate.
We stared at the slimy, disgusting stuff. “What’s the matter?” Daddy asked. “You haven’t touched your vegetables. Don’t you know asparagus is a rich man’s treat in most parts of the world? A delicacy.”
“Mom says we have to eat all of it.”
“Try it with ketchup,” he advised, and all four of us dove for the ketchup bottle. Well-doused, we gagged it down.
“If it comes up three times, you don’t have to eat it,” Mom said cheerfully. Mine was close at two point five.
In the years since our rattlesnake days, not one of us kids has developed a taste for asparagus, and think that hollandaise is best served on eggs Benedict (hard poached for me, thanks). And that goes for rattlesnake meat, too. I had it once at Ole Knowles’s annual New Year’s smorgasbord, pickled, in small, one or two vertebra cross sections. I stared at it on my plate and looked around for the ketchup.
Many years later when I lived at Glen Ivy in California on our land that abutted the sagebrush and juniper wilderness of Cleveland National Forest, Vic Summers killed a four-footer of the local sub-species one spring. He lopped off head and tail with his machete, then roasted it on his Weber outdoor barbecue in about one-foot lengths like big German sausages. “Yep,” he said, offering me a bite, “tastes just like chicken.”
I tried it most cautiously. I was amazed to discover that rattlesnake meat tastes like asparagus and fear and hot, dusty spring days, and makes my hands itch with remembered slime. The taste made me recall one May in the mid 1960s when my siblings and I slipped out of the house and went out in the pre-dawn to jump on as many hundreds of new asparagus as we could so we wouldn’t have to pick them. I loved the jumping up, the smashing down, the snap and splat of freshly ruined asparagus.